Fear
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Finding her comfortable bourgeois existence as wife and mother predictable after eight years of marriage, Irene Wagner brings a little excitement into it by starting an affair with a rising young pianist. Her lover’s former mistress begins blackmailing her, threatening to give her secret away to her husband. Irene is soon in the grip of agonizing fear.
Written in the spring of 1913, and first published in 1920, this novella is one of Stefan Zweig’s most powerful studies of a woman’s mind and emotions.
La Paura (1954) the Roberto Rossellini film based on the Stefan Zweig novel Fear was the last of the extraordinary features in which Rossellini directed Ingrid Bergman, who was then his wife.
Stefan Zweig
Stefan Zweig (1881-1942), novelist, biographer, poet, and translator, was born in Vienna into a wealthy Austrian Jewish family. During the 1930s, he was one of the bestselling writers in Europe, and was among the most translated German-language writers before the Second World War. With the rise of Nazism, he moved from Salzburg to London (taking British citizenship), to New York, and finally to Brazil, where he committed suicide with his wife. New York Review Books has published Zweig's novels The Post-Office Girl and Beware of Pity as well as the novella Chess Story.
More by Stefan Zweig
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